Introduction - William Gaddis



Folkways and Law Ways: Law in American Studies

by Helle Porsdam

(University of Southern Denmark Press, 2001)

which contains two essays on Gaddis

Introduction

Rumor has it that the character of Professor Nicki Morris in One L, Scott Turow’s memoir of his first year at the Harvard Law School, is based on Professor Duncan Kennedy. If true, Kennedy has every reason to be pleased: Nicki Morris is one of young Turow’s legal heroes. Unlike certain other Harvard law professors, Morris sees the law’s search as profound and wide-ranging. In his class, Turow feels the gap between legal ideas and those he has encountered in other fields of study close down. Things make sense to an extent that they never do in other classes. In the end, it is Morris who puts into words Turow’s feelings and thoughts about the law.

The law, Nicki said, … is a humanistic discipline. It is so broad a reflection of the society, the culture, that it is ripe for the questions posed by any field of inquiry: linguistics, philosophy, history, literary studies, sociology, economics, mathematics.1 

The themes and arguments of Kennedy’s two latest books, Sexy Dressing Etc. (1993) and A Critique of Adjudication (Fin de siècle) (1997), indicate that the rumors have a factual basis.2 The four essays that make up Sexy Dressing concern “the power and politics of cultural identity.” The subtitle is well-chosen. Sexy Dressing covers a lot of ground. So does A Critique of Adjudication, which addresses in particular “the role of political ideology, in the simple sense of, say, ‘liberalism’ or ‘conservatism,’ or ‘states’ rights’ and ‘abolitionism,’ in the part of judicial activity that is best described as law making.”3 But in discussing the grand questions concerning the meaning and effects of adjudication in society, Kennedy touches on every major issue currently the subject of intellectual and cultural debate.

That Kennedy, a co-founder of Critical Legal Studies (CLS), sees the law as a broad reflection of American society and culture should come as no surprise. Since its tentative beginnings in the late 1970s, CLS has been an interdisciplinary endeavor. As Kennedy and other “Crits” see it, questions concerning cultural identity, power, and law in today’s multicultural America can only be successfully dealt with if legal scholars draw inspiration from both the humanities and the social sciences. What is perhaps more surprising is that legal scholars of a more traditional “observation,” for whom the postmodernist turn of CLS and its offspring such as Critical Race Theory (CRT) is dangerous and reprehensible, have also come increasingly to acknowledge a broadening of interests within contemporary American law. Richard A. Posner, one of the founders of the Law and Economics movement, is a case in point. Posner has mostly found the tools and methodology of economics useful in his analysis of American law. Yet, in his preface to Overcoming Law (1995), he tells his reader to prepare herself for an approach that is far from being exclusively economic.

We live at a time when economists, like Ronald Coase and Gary Becker, philosophers, like John Rawls and Richard Rorty, and literary critics, like Stanley Fish, are real presences in legal scholarship. So the reader of this book will find, along with chapters on judges, the legal profession, legal scholarship, the Constitution, and the regulation of employment contracts, chapters that deal with sexuality, social constructionism, feminism, rhetoric, institutional economics, political theory, and the depiction of law in literature. Even my forays into topics as remote from the conventional domain of legal theory as the ancestry of Beethoven, feuds in medieval Iceland, child care in ancient Greece, and the education of deaf children have grown out of my professional interests as a judge and legal scholar.4 

What Posner has come to realize – and what legal scholars such as Kennedy have been aware of for quite some time – is that American law has everything to do with American identity, American culture. Foreign observers of America have always been puzzled by the invocation in all kinds of unlikely contexts of judicial authority, by the constant reference to personal rights and freedoms, and by the way in which any topic – be it political, moral, social or cultural – invariably turns into a legal one. Permeating, as it does, all levels of American society and penetrating all corners of American culture, the law therefore makes an obvious area of study for anyone interested in American Studies.5 Where legal scholars have long focused on the role of law in the shaping of American identity, it is only within the past ten to fifteen years that American Studies scholars have shown a serious interest in law. This is somewhat puzzling – especially because American Studies prides itself on being a thoroughly interdisciplinary field whose areas of interest are the totality of American culture and the formation of American identity.

Books such as Jerold S. Auerbach’s Justice without Law? Richard H. Weisberg’s The Failure of the Word, Robert A. Ferguson’s Law and Letters in American Culture, and Carl S. Smith, John P. McWilliams, Jr., and Maxwell Bloomfield’s Law and American Literature from the mid-1980s really drew the attention of American Studies scholars to the law as an important cultural factor.6 Historians and literary scholars have always written on various aspects of American law, but only rarely have they attempted to relate these aspects to more general American Studies discussions concerning American ways of thinking about and formulating social, political, moral, and cultural issues. Auerbach set the scene for such discussions when he noted that,

by now the predominance of law as a cultural force is beyond dispute. It might be measured by the assertive role of the Supreme Court (whether heroic or villainous is beyond the point); by the hypnotic allure of the courtroom trial as a staple of national melodrama; by the astonishing attractiveness of the legal profession as a career choice. No longer is it possible to reflect seriously about American culture without accounting for the centrality of law in American history and society, and in the mythology of American uniqueness and grandeur.7 

The years since Justice without Law? have seen many important works on the role of law in American culture. They may roughly – and at the risk of grossly generalizing – be divided into three categories: law and history, law and literature, and law and popular culture. In the following, I take a look at each of these categories. Law and literature is the best established of the three, and many of the discussions going on in law and history and law and popular culture have their origin in debates taking place within law and literature. In practice, these issues and debates overlap, so that it is not always possible – or indeed desirable – to say of a particular issue whether it “belongs” to one category or another.

With the possible exception of the final essay, which forms a category in and of itself, the ten essays in this volume may all be said to fall into one of the three categories. The thematic approaches of the ten essays are very different and wide-ranging. What the authors of the essays all have in common is a concern for American law and legal discourse as these relate to American culture. Incorporating into the field of American Studies legal concerns and legal issues presents both methodological and ideological problems. Several of these are intrinsic to the very attempt of doing interdisciplinary work and consequently concern the nature of American Studies itself. Addressing these problems as they crop up in relation to the works discussed, the contributing authors show that, just as it is in the field of law that some of the most interesting cultural and political discussions are taking place these days, so it is in law and American Studies that some of the most fertile debates of our discipline may be found.

Law and history is not a movement or even a field in the same way that law and literature is, although historians have always been aware of the importance of law for American history. In the preface to his famous book on Blackstone’s Commentaries, The Mysterious Science of the Law (1941), Daniel J. Boorstin writes, for example, that the book “is designed to suggest how [the lawyer], in common with the rest of the community, employs the ideas and assumptions of his day about the whole of human experience” and to give evidence that “the lawyer’s work, whether or not the lawyer is aware of it, is in the main stream of the history of thought.”8 Likewise, in his seminal The Life of the Mind in America (1965), Perry Miller writes about the rise of a legal mentality among Americans.9 As a field in and of its own right, however, legal history is not that old. Many courses were offered in American constitutional history during the first half of this century, but “even as late as the 1950s, historians of the United States did not think of legal history as a field at all.”10 When historians finally did discover legal history, they occupied themselves with statutes and doctrines, appellate judicial opinions, and other material internal to the legal system. To some, it was the whole institutional process concerning the passage of laws and statutes that merited their attention.11 Others found the legal profession itself and its role in American society interesting12 and concentrated their efforts on describing the origins and the status of lawyers and writing biographies of great American jurists.13 A third group of legal historians investigated issues relating to the police and the enforcement of laws,14 issues that led in turn to an interest in crime levels and social deviance.15

“Whatever its pretense to autonomy,” argues Anthony Chase, “law cannot be adequately understood when separated from historical context.”16 Ever since Lawrence M. Friedman introduced and popularized the concept of an American “legal culture” in the 1960s and 1970s, members of the legal academy and others interested in American law have engaged in lengthy debates as to whether or not it is necessary to look beyond legal scholarship itself to understand the place of law in American culture and society. As Friedman saw it, a legal system consists of three components: institutions and their processes, rules, and a legal culture. The two former components make up the internal workings of the legal system, whereas the latter is directed toward the external aspects of law, “the ideas, attitudes, values, and beliefs that people hold about the legal system.”17 Though some legal scholars would still want to keep the law “pure,” as it were, the sizable number of articles in the country’s best law journals devoted to issues that link law and its practitioners to American society and culture in general testifies that Friedman’s concept of legal culture has by now become a mainstay in legal history scholarship.

In the 1970s and 1980s, inspired by scholars such as J. Willard Hurst and, as we just saw, Friedman, social historians began looking beyond legal statutes and doctrine toward legal records of all kinds.18 Court cases and legal codes were now of interest, less for what they might reveal about the workings of the judicial system itself, than for what they might tell us about the general history and development of the United States. Whether the specific area of interest was the origins of slavery and segregation,19 bastardy and bridal pregnancy,20 privacy,21 family and gender relations,22 or legal reform movements, law codes and court cases were perceived as sources for social history.23 The preoccupation of the older generation of legal historians with the highest level of the American judicial system, notably the Supreme Court and its decisions, moreover, was viewed as too narrow. From now on, every level of the judicial system, from the Supreme Court to local common councils, was seen as worthy of investigation.

From the insistence of the new social history on recovering legal records of all kinds and from all levels of society, it is but a short jump to the interdisciplinary orientation of recent legal historiography. The blurring of boundaries between established fields of study such as history and law, which is implicit in the assertion made by Friedman, Hurst, and others that a true understanding of how law operates in society may only be gained if we stop looking at legal history as a specialized, narrow inquiry, does present problems. Most important, there is the question of methodology (and ideology) – whose methodology (and ideology) prevails, that of history or that of law? The claim that law can play an important role in highlighting and making intelligible the past is pretty much accepted by both legal theorists and historians. “Like the discipline of history, the law remains anchored to a factual record that must be investigated and probed with an eye toward organizing events and actions into a coherent narrative embedded within a narrative framework.”24 But when legal historians start to experiment with what does and does not constitute a “proper” historical source by including in their research the materials of popular culture, oral history, local archival work, and participant observation, for example, there is a danger that they end up using legal culture as “a catchall” that can include “what we want grouped together and exclude what we want left out.”25 While legal culture “remains murky in theory and elusive in practice,” as Richard J. Ross puts it, the concept invites historians to broaden the context of what they intuitively consider relevant.

Yet despite its murkiness – or, to some extent, because of it – the concept [of legal culture] has invigorated recent historiography. Its lack of clarity and rigor makes it a useful heuristic and scholarly catalyst. The alluring ambiguity of legal culture offers a standing invitation to arrange seemingly unconnected bits of the past in new and revealing patterns without dampening enthusiasm or imagination by suggesting in advance what should or should not matter or by prejudging how the elements might be arranged.26

According to Ross, that is, it is primarily the interdisciplinary quality of the notion of legal culture that makes it useful to historians. As is the case with American Studies, of which it forms an important part, nothing – no concern, topic, or element, however trivial – is off-limits to the legal historiographer. Inclusiveness, intellectual diversity, and flexibility are the keywords here; in the opinion of young legal historians such as Ross, they are what make for good, innovative legal historiography.

“Much of contemporary legal scholarship,” writes R. Richard Banks, “expresses a narrative impulse. Eschewing the traditional norms and forms of legal scholarship, many professors have turned to storytelling to capture issues not easily elucidated through more conventional approaches.”27 The narrative approach has been gaining prominence through the writings of Critical Legal Feminist and CRT scholars.28 Within the past ten years, intellectuals and writers have produced a significant amount of “different,” nontraditional – often very personal – writing about gender, race, and law. This writing, which includes personal essays, memoirs, and full autobiographies, is often written for a broader audience than that of traditional legal scholarship.29

In using storytelling as a way of alerting lawyers and nonlawyers alike that, as Robin Williams puts it, “laws have a profound impact upon the subjectivity of people, children, slaves, women, and other living things who either might or might not participate in their textual production, interpretation, or critique,” CRT scholars build on and further develop concerns that have been present in the law and literature movement since its tentative beginnings in the 1970s.30 Law and literature is “a project that is most easily defined as a process of reading and comparing literary and legal texts for the insight each provides into the other, and whose combined force illuminates our understanding of ourselves and our society.”31 The project or movement consists of two somewhat different enterprises or concerns. Roughly speaking, there is “law-in-literature” and there is “law-as-literature.” The distinction is Robert Weisberg’s and was introduced in his influential and much-quoted 1988 article, “The Law-Literature Enterprise.”32 The distinction, as Weisberg himself points out, is most useful in terms of sorting out existing scholarship in the field. In practice, “the best works on the two sides of the line tend to converge, because they constitute the work that captures the best insights about the relationship between the aesthetic and the political-ethical visions and forces in society.”33

Law-in-literature scholars pursue the detailed study of specific authors and texts for the light they shed on legal issues and their impact on our lives. The area is not new. In the nineteenth century, English lawyers were interested in the ways in which Shakespeare, Dickens, and others dealt with the legal system. In an American context, it is somewhat more recent that critics have realized the extent to which law plays a prominent part in American letters.34

Underlying – and partly shaping – the discourse of law-in-literature are two basic assumptions: first, law and legal thinking have always been or are increasingly becoming too rigid, technical, and abstract, and, second, precisely because the law is a generalizing and abstracting mechanism, it may at times be necessary to supplement its professionally detached and rational voice with a more human and passionate one. This is where literature comes in. Posner, a key player in the law-in-literature debate, cites a number of important connections between law and literature: the issue of interpretation is central to both; legal texts resemble literary texts in being highly rhetorical; literature is subject to legal regulation under such rubrics as defamation, obscenity, and copyright; and judicial opinions often employ literary devices. Finally, the legal process has a significant theatrical dimension to it, which is attractive to writers of literature.35

What chiefly interests Posner, a one-time law professor turned judge, is what lawyers can learn from literature and literary theory. Expressing “a warm though qualified enthusiasm for the field of law and literature,” he points to the way in which literary works can teach lawyers empathy and give them insights into the concerns and problems of other people.36 When it comes to some of the larger and more ambitious claims made on behalf of law and literature by post-structuralist critics, however, Posner’s attitude is less positive.37 Other participants in the law-in-literature enterprise see greater potential in the new, interdisciplinary field. James Boyd White, Richard Weisberg, and Robert Weisberg, for example, do not limit their interest to literary texts and literary theory that may clarify the place of law in society.38 They are willing to confront some of the more politically controversial consequences of bringing together two different fields of inquiry.39 These consequences – and the willingness to confront them – take us to the law-as-literature part of the law-literature enterprise.40 This is the more elusive and hard-to-define part. Whichever way one looks at it, however, the essence of law-as-literature is “the suggestion that the techniques and methods of literary theory and analysis are appropriate to legal scholarship.”41 The belief in the usefulness of literary scholarship to legal scholarship has led law-as-literature scholars to pursue two different areas of inquiry: hermeneutics and rhetoric. As some scholars see it, questions relating to the interpretation of legal texts are the most pressing; for others, a focus on how legal arguments attempt to persuade is more relevant.

Inspired by post-structuralist and deconstructionist thinking, scholars such as Stanley Fish, Ronald Dworkin, and Owen M. Fiss stress that legal practice is legal interpretation and that legal scholars may learn a thing or two from their colleagues in the humanities who are engaged in literary analysis and interpretation.42 What occupies all three is that, with the recognition that any critical approach is at root textual and that the literature of law is inevitable, the possibility that texts are radically indeterminate becomes an ever-present reality. Fish is somewhat more at ease than are Fiss and Dworkin with the dangers of excessive interpretive freedom. For the latter, the specter of the unconstrained judge who can interpret and apply the law according to her own subjective whims looms large and suggests a dangerous slide toward nihilism.

If Fish and Company wish to make us conscious that the law is what we make of it and that this state of affairs presents problems in relation to the interpretation of legal texts, other critics wish to draw our attention to the ways in which the law manages to cover up how it works and manipulates. Gerald Frug suggests, for example, that “we look at legal argument as an example of rhetoric,” just as James Boyd White wishes to replace the focus on the problem of indeterminacy with a focus on how legal writers read and write texts.43 A thematic or a textual approach, or both, to law may distract us from the politics of law, these writers feel. Neither approach quite catches the way in which a text “assumes an equality of voices” and thereby “obscures – precisely by equating – speakers of different genders or races or classes.”44 Legal writing is as open to the uses and misuses of power as any kind of writing, and it is only by emphasizing the dimension of figurative description or style that we may successfully expose legal writing as a vehicle for the distribution and use of power. Indeed, for Robin West, law is politics and power relations, not textual interpretation. The analogy between law and literature, she suggests, should not be carried too far. Adjudication may be interpretive in form, but in substance it is an exercise of power in a way that literary interpretation is not.45 For the past decade or so, West has used the forum of law and literature to champion the needs of “the textually excluded – those robbed of subjectivity and speech.”46 The true promise of law and literature, as she sees it, lies in its ability to educate about the politics of law. Though at odds with colleagues who see the study of literature as an exercise in liberal education, West thus ultimately has as much of an educational ambition for law and literature as they do.

When we get to the emerging field of law and popular culture – or, as some scholars call it, popular legal culture – it no longer makes sense to employ categories such as literature and history.47 Law and popular culture is an interdisciplinary field; its practitioners consciously seek to blur the boundaries between older, more traditional fields of study. Yet the interest in the ways in which the realities of law and justice are changed, not merely because of legal scholarship, but also because consumers take the attitudes and ideas of the legal stories to which they have been exposed with them into places of power where they take root, recalls debates going on within the field of law and history. Likewise, the interest among these practitioners in legal storytelling, in what kinds of legal stories are told and how they are being constructed, and in what ways the people who consume these legal stories are affected by them, is immediately familiar to us from the law and literature debate.

What gave rise to the field of law and popular culture was the realization that there is a complex relationship among popular culture, the day-to-day operation of the legal system, and the ideas that books, films, and television shows attempt to convey. Most Americans learn about their legal system indirectly, from novels, newspapers and magazines, and perhaps most of all from films and television. These are the media that tell those legal stories that “bring us into contact with a cultural repository of common knowledge and popular belief concerning law, truth, and social justice in our time.”48

Legal storytelling merits our attention for several reasons. First of all, what people consider necessary, acceptable, or just may form the basis for their support of the legal system. If we concentrate our efforts at understanding the place of law in society around the reading of specific legal rules and the operation of the legal system, we miss out on one very important source of law: the popular imagination. Second, the popular myths, images, and storytelling conventions that help shape the popular imagination remind us that we are surrounded by a plurality of legal meanings. For legal officials and law professors, whose working lives are intimately related to law, legal ideas and symbols are bound to have a different meaning from the one they hold for lay persons. Similarly, various groups in a nation or culture may experience and therefore think very differently about the law and its practitioners.

Beyond teaching practical lessons about the variety of legal sources and legal meanings, the pursuit of legal storytelling may be beneficial in a more theoretical way, participants in the law and popular culture debates claim. Legal storytelling may expand not only the traditional range of legal studies, but also the traditional range of American Studies. Here is Richard Sherwin on the attempt to transform traditional legal studies:

[The study of law and popular culture] seeks to include what has often been omitted, such as the feelings, desires, conflicting impulses and wishes that circulate within the law, from its narrative construction to its (at times violent) social effects. To recognize this part of legal reality is to recognize as well the evisceration of the legal fictions that in the past succeeded in keeping this domain in the shadows. This includes the fiction that law derives from dispassionate reason, that it is the product of objective analysis disengaged from feeling or desire, and the fiction that legitimate legal decision making cannot occur in the absence of deductive or inductive logic, strict causal analysis, and well-reasoned explanation.49 

The echoes of a CLS-inspired attack on law’s rationality and neutrality as well as a Robin West-inspired call for the inclusion of “other voices” are unmistakable.

Scholars believe that important and innovative interdisciplinary work may result when they venture into this sphere. The parameters are not yet fixed; opinions as to how the domain is constructed, what and who it includes and excludes, and how it should be approached and analyzed vary. As Steve Redhead sees it, for example, the disciplinary terrain of “popular cultural studies” arises “where ‘law’ and ‘popular culture’ meet; where the battle over terms such as ‘unpopular’ and ‘popular,’ ‘legal’ and ‘illegal,’ ‘normal’ and ‘pathological,’ ‘straight’ and ‘deviant’ are fought out.”50 Redhead wants to explore “the diverse languages of law (of law as made up of a body of texts and institutions and personnel) within a narrative and historical setting,” and he proposes three areas of study as particularly relevant for the field of law and popular culture: the role of law in licensing popular entertainment and regulating public spaces, the role of legal institutions in the changing forms of ownership and control of cultural goods and services, and the involvement of law in moral censure, particularly in the domains of domesticity and sexuality.51

For Sherwin and for Stewart Macauley, the worlds of law, film, and television increasingly overlap, and this calls for a careful examination of the images and stories furnished by popular culture.52 David Ray Papke’s research reflects a “concern with the dominant American culture’s most basic law-related faith, institutions, motifs and disbelievers.”53 It is, he argues, in attention to cultural configurations and conventions such as courtroom trials, lawyer novels, and films that the analysis of law and popular culture must begin.54 John Denvir concentrates his scholarly efforts on Hollywood films. Unabashed products of “mass” culture, Hollywood films turn out to provide a comparative advantage over “serious” narrative texts, he argues, in that they “draw upon a broader variety of communicative tools than novels in their attempt to engage our emotional response.”55

Finally, many researchers are looking into how the law and lawyers are presented to the public. Are lawyers heroes or villains? Is the legal system portrayed as a well-functioning part of the American democracy or as a part that can no longer be trusted to work fairly and impartially? What role do gender, race, and class play in the day-to-day operation of the American justice system, and how are these reflected in the media? These are but some of the questions raised by law and popular culture scholars.56 As these scholars see it, representations in popular culture of law and lawyers are a cultural barometer that can provide useful information about current norms and values as well as about alternative normative possibilities and ways of thinking. And precisely because the law is such an important cultural factor in American history and society, law and popular culture scholars feel a need to intrude on the kind of scholarship traditionally undertaken by legal scholars.

Irmina Wawrzyczek, Saul Cornell, Niels Bjerre-Poulsen, and Mark Gibney all consider issues relating to debates carried on among law and history scholars. Wawrzyczek’s contribution, “Plantation Economy and Legal Safeguards of Sexual Discipline in Early Tobacco Colonies,” is a study of the legal behavior of the settlers in Virginia and Maryland in the seventeenth century. She argues that the white male planter-lawmakers and law officers used the legal apparatus and legal discourse in their efforts to control the sexual activities of their indentured servants and African slaves. In “The Irony of Progressive Historiography: A Critical Comment on the Revival of Anti-Federalism in Contemporary Constitutional Thought,” Cornell offers a critique of the constitutional canon. Unlike many other fields within the humanities and the social sciences, American constitutional history has never really been deconstructed so as to include alternative voices and sources. Only when the canon of constitutional history is deconstructed, Cornell argues, may the field be re-conceptualized.

Since its emergence in the late 1940s, and especially since the Supreme Court’s famous decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka in 1954, the American conservative movement has been heavily opposed to judicial activism. With the appointment by Ronald Reagan in the late 1980s of conservative Supreme Court judges, however, this attitude has changed. In “‘Hunting in the Pond Where the Ducks Are’: Conservative Opposition to Civil Rights Legislation in the 1964 Election and Beyond,” Bjerre-Poulsen shows how conservative attitudes toward constitutional interpretation in the area of civil rights have changed since the 1960s and how many conservatives have come to see the court as a possible engine for their own cultural counterrevolution. Gibney explores the intersection of citizenship and nationality. His essay examines under what circumstances that firm American belief in living under the rule of law is (still) justified. As implied by his provocative title, “Protection under United States Law?: It Depends on Who You Are, Where You Are, What Aspect of Your Job You Are Talking About, and Who Is Trying to Hurt You,” he believes that the protection of American law is mainly reserved for American citizens. Whether they are the targets of American criminal investigations or merely innocent bystanders caught up in American law enforcement activities, foreigners receive little protection.

Bosse Ekelund, Peter Schneck, and Marcus Bruce take us into law and literature. According to Ekelund, William Gaddis’s novel A Frolic of His Own constitutes an astute analysis of a contemporary America in which law, art, and politics are all affected by the forces of spectacle. Ekelund’s argument, in “Recognizing the Law: Value and Identities in William Gaddis’s A Frolic of His Own,” is that Gaddis attempts in his last novel to mount a defense of the values of art and law from the forces of spectacle, that is, the combined power of the press, Hollywood, and populist politicians. Schneck is also interested in Gaddis and his concern that the legal process in the United States threatens to turn into a mindless spectacle, staged exclusively for the media and directed by the petty personal interests of the lawyers, judges, and journalists involved. By comparing, in “Dissenting Opinions: William Gaddis and Alan Dershowitz on the Spectacle of Justice,” Gaddis’s A Frolic of His Own to Dershowitz’s The Advocate’s Devil (both from 1994), Schneck shows how, for all their obvious differences of opinion about American law and culture, both writers share a concern for what they see as a distortion of public and private notions of justice and truth by the dominant media. In “‘The Promise of American Life’: Derrick Bell, Critical Race Theory, and the American Jeremiad,” Bruce discusses one of the most promising new fields in law and literature, Critical Race Theory. He relates Bell’s attempt to renew the genre of legal writing in such novels as And We Are Not Saved (1987), Faces at the Bottom of the Well (1992), and especially Gospel Choirs (1996) to the tradition of the American Jeremiad described by Sacvan Bercovitch and shows how Bell points toward the theme of Christian love in his latest novel to ameliorate messages of bitterness and defeat in matters relating to race relations in the United States.

Christophe Den Tandt’s essay on “Hollywood Courtroom Dramas: The Politics of Judicial Realism” and Eric Guthey’s essay on “A Brief Cultural History of Corporate Legal Theory and Why American Studies Should Care about It” belong to the category of law and popular culture. Den Tandt focuses on courtroom dramas both in Hollywood films and on television from the 1930s to the present. He contends that these dramas have largely been vehicles for liberal politics by fostering trust in the federal judicial system whenever race and other discrimination have been excused in the name of states rights. Growing skepticism about the liberal foundation of American democracy notwithstanding, recent film and television productions have not fundamentally challenged the belief in law’s promise, but have instead insisted on pursuing – and (re)constructing – the liberal American self. Guthey’s focus is corporate legal theory and its influence on individual and collective conceptions of American identity. He surveys the cultural work performed by the real entity theory of the corporation, from its prehistory in the Dartmouth College v. Woodward decision (1819), through its more complete articulation in turn-of-the-century jurisprudence, to its replacement by the nexus-of-contracts theories currently in vogue. By relating this cultural work to media legends such as Ted Turner, he shows how the various transformations in corporate jurisprudence have contributed to considerable confusion about the distinctions between the public and the private spheres in American social life.

In “American Links to Legal Reform in Ireland, 1937-1997: A Study in the International Impact of American Constitutional Law,” Michael Böss discusses the way American constitutional law has inspired Irish lawyers and politicians, notably Mary Robinson, in their attempts to create political and legal reform in the Republic of Ireland from the 1960s to the present day. His is a new and interesting approach to the international theme, an approach that links law to American culture but does not directly fall into law and history, law and literature, or law and popular culture. In identifying what the Irish find so attractive about American law that they wish to import it into their own system, Böss’s essay nicely sums up ideas about American law and culture, thereby providing a fitting conclusion to this volume.

Notes

 1. Scott Turow, One L (New York, 1977), 200.

 2. Duncan Kennedy, Sexy Dressing Etc. Essays on the Power and Politics of Cultural Identity (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), and A Critique of Adjudication (Fin de siècle) (Cambridge, Mass., 1997).

 3. Kennedy, A Critique of Adjudication, 1.

 4. Richard A. Posner, Overcoming Law (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), vii.

 5. For a brief overview of some of the ways in which Americans find and construct meaning with reference to law, see David Ray Papke, “Law in American Culture: An Overview,” 15 Journal of American Culture, 3 (1992). See also Helle Porsdam, Legally Speaking: Contemporary American Culture and the Law (Amherst, Mass., 1999).

 6. Jerold S. Auerbach, Justice without Law? Resolving Disputes without Lawyers (New York, 1983); Richard H. Weisberg, The Failure of the Word: The Protagonist as Lawyer in Modern Fiction (New Haven, 1984); Robert A. Ferguson, Law and Letters in American Culture (Cambridge, Mass., 1984); Carl S. Smith, John P. McWilliams Jr., and Maxwell Bloomfield, Law and American Literature: A Collection of Essays (New York, 1983).

 7. Auerbach, Justice without Law? 115.

 8. Daniel J. Boorstin, The Mysterious Science of the Law: An Essay on Blackstone’s Commentaries (Chicago, 1996; orig. pub. 1941), xvii.

 9. Perry Miller, The Life of the Mind in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War (New York, 1965). Book two is called “The Rise of the Legal Mentality.”

10. Stanley N. Katz, “Explaining the Law in Early American History,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Ser., 50 (1993), 4. See also Katz, “The Problem of a Colonial Legal History,” in Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole, eds., Colonial British America: Essays in the New History of the Early Modern Era (Baltimore, 1984), 457-89.

11. The following notes are merely meant to suggest what has been written in these areas of interest to legal historians; they are by no means exhaustive. See, e.g., Irving Brant, The Bill of Rights: Its Origin and Meaning (New York, 1967); Edward P. Hutchinson, Legislative History of American Immigration Policy, 1798-1965 (Philadelphia, 1981); John V. Orth, The Judicial Power of the United States: The Eleventh Amendment in American History (New York, 1987); and Alfred H. Kelly, Wilfred A. Harbison, and Herman Belz, The American Constitution: Its Origins and Developments (New York, 1991).

12. See, e.g., Auerbach, Unequal Justice: Lawyers and Social Change in Modern America (New York, 1976); Morton J. Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, 1780-1860 (Cambridge, Mass., 1977), and The Transformation of American Law, 1870-1960 (Cambridge, Mass., 1991); Michael G. Kammen, A Machine That Would Go of Itself: The Constitution in American Culture (New York, 1986); Henry J. Abraham, Freedom and the Court: Civil Rights and Liberties in the United States (New York, 1988), and Justices and Presidents: A Political History of Appointments to the Supreme Court (New York, 1992); William M. Wiecek, Liberty under Law: The Supreme Court in American Life (Baltimore, 1988); Richard L. Abel, American Lawyers (New York, 1989); Kermit L. Hall, The Magic Mirror: Law in American History (New York, 1989); and Peter Charles Hoffer, The Law’s Conscience: Equitable Constitutionalism in America (Chapel Hill, N. C., 1990).

13. See, e.g., G. Edward White, The American Judicial Tradition: Profiles of Leading American Judges (New York, 1976), Earl Warren (New York, 1982), and Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: Law and the Inner Self (New York, 1993); Sheldon Novick, Honorable Justice (Boston, 1989); Charles F. Hobson, The Great Chief Justice: John Marshall and the Rule of Law (Lawrence, Kan., 1996); and Jean Edward Smith, John Marshall: Definer of a Nation ( New York, 1996).

14. Robert M. Fogelson, Big-City Police (Cambridge, Mass., 1977); Francis A. Allen, The Decline of the Rehabilitative Ideal: Penal Policy and Social Purpose (New Haven, 1981); Norval Morris and Michael Tonry, Between Prison and Probation: Intermediate Punishment in a Rational Sentencing System (New York, 1990); Gary Kleck, Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America (New York, 1991); Marvin E. Frankel, Criminal Sentences: Law without Order (New York, 1993).

15. Anthony M. Platt, The Child Saver: The Invention of Delinquency (Chicago, 1969); S. Brown, Objectivity and Cultural Divergence (New York, 1984); James B. Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage: America’s Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950s (New York, 1986); Victoria E. Bynum, Unruly Women: The Politics of Social and Sexual Control in the Old South (Chapel Hill, N. C., 1992); Marie-Christine Leps, Apprehending the Criminal: The Production of Deviance in Nineteenth Century Discourse (Durham, N. C., 1992); Michael Cruit and Pat Lauderdale, The Struggle for Control: A Study of Law, Disputes and Deviance (New York, 1993); L. Calhoun, “Institutions and Deviance – Art and Psychiatry,” Critical Review, 8 (1994), 393; J. M. Lehman, “Durkheim Theories of Deviance and Suicide: A Feminist Reconsideration,” American Journal of Sociology, 100 (1995), 904; C. Stanley, “Teenage Kicks: Urban Narratives of Dissent Not Deviance,” Crime Law and Social Change, 23 (1995), 91.

16. Anthony Chase, “Historical Reconstruction in Popular Legal and Political Culture,” Seton Hall Law Review, 42 (1994), 1992.

17. Lawrence M. Friedman, “Legal Culture and the Welfare State,” in Guenther Teubner, Dilemmas of Law in the Welfare State (1985), reprinted in Law and Society: Readings on the Social Study of Law, ed. Stewart Macauley, Friedman, and John Stookey (New York, 1995), 269.

18. See, e.g., J. Willard Hurst, The Growth of American Law: The Law Makers (Boston, 1950); The Legitimacy of the Business Corporation in the Law of the United States, 1780-1970 (Charlottesville, Va., 1970); Law and the Conditions of Freedom in the Nineteenth Century United States (Madison, Wis., 1964); and Law and Economic Growth: The Legal History of the Lumber Industry in Wisconsin (Madison, Wis., 1984).

19. See, e.g., Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. The Board of Education and Black America’s Struggle for Equality (New York, 1975); John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Ante-Bellum South (New York, 1979); J. Harvey Wilkinson III, From Brown to Bakke: The Supreme Court and School Integration, 1954-78 (New York, 1979); Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese, Fruits of Merchant Capital: Slavery and Bourgeois Property in the Rise and Expansion of Capitalism (New York, 1983); Donald G. Nieman, Promises to Keep: African-Americans and the Constitutional Order, 1776 to the Present (New York, 1991); and Eugene D. Genovese, The Southern Front: History and Politics in the Cultural War (Columbia, Mo., 1995).

20. See, e.g., Peter Laslett et al., eds., Bastardy and Its Comparative History: Studies in the History of Illegitimacy and Marital Nonconformism (Cambridge, Mass., 1980); Rickie Solinger, Wake Up Little Susie: Single Pregnancy and Race Before Roe v. Wade (New York, 1992); Marie Mac

Lean, The Name of the Mother: Writing Illegitimacy (New York, 1994); and Llewyllyn Hendrix, Illegitimacy and Social Structures: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Nonmarital Birth (Westport, Conn., 1996).

21. See, e.g,. Richard F. Hixson, Privacy in a Public Society: Human Rights in Conflict (New York, 1987); Julie Innes, Privacy, Intimacy, and Isolation (New York, 1992); Vincent J. Samar, The Right to Privacy: Gays, Lesbians, and the Constitution (Philadelphia, 1992); David J. Garrow, Liberty and Sexuality: The Right to Privacy and the Making of Roe v. Wade (New York, 1994); Michelle Perrot, A History of Private Life (Cambridge, Mass., 1994); Deckle McLean, Privacy and Its Invasion (Westport, Conn., 1995); and Patricia Boling, Privacy and the Politics of Intimate Life (Ithaca, N. Y., 1996).

22. See, e.g., William H. Chafe, Women and Equality: Changing Patterns in American Culture (New York, 1977); Rudy Ray Seward, The American Family: A Demographic History (Beverly Hills, Calif., 1978); Michael Gordon, ed., The American Family in Social-Historical Perspective (New York, 1983); Carol Groneman and Mary Beth Norton, eds., “To Toil the Livelong Day”: America’s Women at Work, 1780-1980 (Ithaca, N. Y., 1987); Steven Mintz and Susan Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions. A Social History of American Family Life (New York, 1988); and Linda Gordon, Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence (New York, 1989).

23. See, e.g., Sara M. Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left (New York, 1979); Susan D. Becker, The Origins of the Equal Rights Amendment: American Feminism Between the Wars (Westport, Conn., 1981); Mary Frances Berry, Why the ERA Failed: Politics, Women’s Rights, and the Amending Process of the Constitution (Bloomington, Ind., 1988); Linda Gordon, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America (New York, 1990); Herman Belz, Equality Transformed: A Quarter-Century of Affirmative Action (New Brunswick, N. J., 1991); and Flora Davis, Moving the Mountain: The Woman’s Movement since 1960 (New York, 1991).

24. Lawrence Douglas, “Wartime Lies: Securing the Holocaust in Law and Literature,” Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities, 7 (1995), 368. See also Theodore Y. Blumoff, “The Third Best Choice: An Essay on Law and History,” Hastings Law Journal, 41 (1990), 537.

25. Richard J. Ross, “The Legal Past of Early New England: Notes for the Study of Law, Legal Culture, and Intellectual History,” WMQ, 50 (1993), 33, 34.

26. Ibid., 34.

27. R. Richard Banks, “The Political Economy of Racial Discourse,” Yale J. Law and Hum., 9 (1997), 217.

28, See, e.g., Kathryn Abrams, “Hearing the Call of Stories,” California Law Review, 79 (1991), 971, which summarizes the use of narratives in Critical Feminist legal scholarship.

29. See, e.g., Richard Delgado, The Rodrigo Chronicles: Conversations about America and Race (New York, 1995), and The Coming Race War? And Other Apocalyptic Tales of America After Affirmative Action and Welfare (New York, 1996); Stephen L. Carter, Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby (New York, 1991); Judy Scales-Trent, Notes of a White Black Woman: Race, Color, Community (University Park, Pa., 1995); and Gregory H. Williams, Life on the Color Line: The True Story of a White Boy Who Discovered He Was Black (New York, 1995).

30. Robin Williams, “Communities, Texts, and Law: Reflections on the Law and Literature Movement,” Yale J. Law and Hum., 1 (1988), 155.

31. Bruce L. Rockwood, “The Good, the Bad, and the Ironic: Two Views on Law and Literature,” ibid., 8 (1996), 533 n. 1.

32. Robert Weisberg, “Law-Literature Enterprise,” ibid., 1 (1988), 1.

33. Ibid., 5.

34. See, e.g., James Boyd White, The Legal Imagination: Studies in the Nature of Legal Thought and Expression (Boston, 1973), When Words Lose Their Meaning: Constitutions and Reconstitutions of Language, Character, and Community (Chicago, 1984) and Heracles’ Bow: Essays on the Rhetoric and Poetics of Law (Madison, Wis., 1985).

35. Posner, Law and Literature: A Misunderstood Relation (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), 8-9.

36. Ibid., 353. This educative ambition of law and literature, and the perceived limitation of the traditional casebook method is something most participants agree on. It is interesting to note in this connection that a comparison may be made between Turow, One L, and more recent accounts of experiences with legal education in Chris Goodrich, Anarchy and Elegance: Confessions of a Journalist at Yale Law School (Boston, 1991), and Richard D. Kahlenberg, Broken Contract: A Memoir of Harvard Law School (New York, 1992). Much like Turow, Goodrich and Kahlenberg relate personal stories about the loss of a moral vision of learning or service. There are 25 years between Turow’s and Goodrich’s and Kahlenberg’s stories. Yet the initial amazement followed by resentment at discovering that learning to think like a lawyer means losing one’s soul, described by Goodrich and Kahlenberg, are very similar to that recalled by Turow. The high expectations Goodrich and Kahlenberg had, even in the early 1990s, on entering law school are remarkable.

37. In Overcoming Law, Posner does mention one particular way in which the study of literature may be of professional use to lawyers. Inspired by Thomas C. Grey, The Wallace Stevens Case: Law and the Practice of Poetry (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), 480-81, he comments, “I now see with the aid of my own interpretive struggles with the poems of Wallace Stevens discussed by Grey that there is another and more favorable light in which to regard [the principle that the reader of a statute or contract or other legal rule or instrument should assume that every meaning was placed there for a purpose]. It is an antidote to hasty, careless, lazy reading. If we assume that every word is there for a purpose, we are made to read and ponder – every word, as we would surely be led to do by a good teacher of poetry. It is only when that principle of interpretation is transformed from a discipline to an algorithm that it is aptly criticized as unrealistic and misleading. At some level, then, law and literature do converge.”

38. Robert Weisberg’s contribution to law and literature consists of his survey on the “Law and Literature Enterprise” and Literary Criticisms of Law (Princeton, 2000). In addition to Failure of the Word, Richard Weisberg has written “Text into Theory: A Literary Approach to the Constitution,” Georgia Law Review, 20 (1986), 846-79; “Coming of Age Some More: ‘Law and Literature’ Beyond the Cradle,” Nova Law Review, 13 (1988), 107; and Poethics: And Other Strategies of Law and Literature (New York, 1992). For James Boyd White, see note 34. His latest are Justice as Translation: An Essay in Cultural and Legal Criticism (Chicago, 1990), Acts of Hope: Creating Authority in Literature, Law and Politics (Chicago, 1995), and From Expectation to Experience: Essays on Law and Legal Education (Michigan, 2000).

39. This may have something to do with the fact that they were all three trained in literary studies before turning to law.

40. Ian Ward sees James Boyd White as a kind of transitional figure, whose interests span both parts of the law-literature enterprise. See Ward, Law and Literature: Possibilities and Perspectives (Cambridge, 1995), chap. 1.

41. Ibid., 16.

42. For Stanley Fish, see Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice and Theory in Literary and Legal Studies (Durham, N. C., 1989), and There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech, and It’s a Good Thing Too (New York, 1994). For Ronald Dworkin, see “Law As Interpretation,” Texas Law Review, 60 (1982), 527-50. Since Law’s Empire (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), in which he affirmed his commitment to the chain novel model as discussed in “Law As Interpretation,” Dworkin has added little to this model of adjudication. In Life’s Dominion: An Argument about Abortion, Euthanasia, and Individual Freedom (New York, 1993), for example, he focuses on the constitutional questions of legalized abortion and euthanasia. For Owen M. Fiss, see “Objectivity and Interpretation,” Stanford Law Review, 34 (1982), 739.

43. Gerald Frug, “Argument as Character,” Stanford Law Review, 40 (1988), 871.

44. Victoria Kahn, “Rhetoric and the Law,” diacritics, 19 (1989), 26.

45. See Robin West, “Adjudication is Not Interpretation,” in her Narrative, Authority, and Law (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1993).

46. West, “Communities, Texts, and Law,” 143.

47. See, e.g., “Symposium: Popular Legal Culture,” Yale Law Journal, 98 (1989), 1545- 58.

48. Richard K. Sherwin, “Picturing Justice: Images of Law and Lawyers in the Visual Media,” University of San Francisco Law Review, 30 (1996), 897.

49. Sherwin, “Picturing Justice,” 898.

50. Steve Redhead, Unpopular Cultures: The Birth of Law and Popular Culture (Manchester, Eng., 1995), 3.

51. Ibid., 9-10. What makes the study of law and popular culture especially pertinent, according to Redhead, is that in our “media-saturated, self-referential culture,” we are witnessing the disappearance of law into popular culture: “Put simply, the claim is that a legal (high) modernism (defined historically as the rule of law, the legal subject, legal rights) is currently fragmenting in such a way that what could be said to be an authority, or power, to regulate and discipline the boundaries of certain social discourses and practices (for example, ‘popular culture,’ ‘postmodernism’) which law once seemed to have had in modernist jurisprudential theory is now fast disappearing” (ibid., 6-7).

52. Stewart Macauley, “Images of Law in Everyday Life: The Lessons of School, Entertainment, and Spectator Sports,” 21 Law and Society Review, 21 (1987), 185.

53. Papke, “Law in American Culture: An Overview,” 4.

54. See Papke, “The Advocate’s Malaise: Contemporary American Lawyer Novels,” Journal of Legal Education, 38 (1988), 413, “The Courtroom Trial as American Cultural Convention,” Popular Culture in Libraries, 2:4 (1994), 53, Heretics in the Temple: Americans Who Reject the Nation’s Legal Faith (New York, 1998), and The Pullman Case: The Clash of Capital and Labor in Industrial America (Kansas City, Mo., 1999).

55. John Denvir, “Legal Reelism: The Hollywood Film As Legal Text,” Legal Studies Forum, 15 (1991), 196. See also Denvir, ed., Legal Reelism: Movies as Legal Texts (Urbana, Ill., 1996). On the topic of law and movies, see Paul Bergman and Michael Asimov, Reel Justice: The Courtroom Goes to the Movies (Kansas City, Mo., 1996), and David A. Black, Law in Film: Resonance and Interpretation (Urbana, Ill., 1999).

56. See, e.g., Donald G. Baker, “The Lawyer in Popular Fiction,” Journal of Popular Culture, 3 (1969), 493; Robert C. Post, “On the Popular Image of the Lawyer: Reflections in a Dark Glass,” California Law Review, 75 (1987), 379; James W. Gordon, “The Popular Image of the American Lawyer: Some Thoughts on Its Nineteenth Century Intellectual Bases,” Washington and Lee Law Review, 46 (1989), 763; Diane M. Glass, “Portia in Primetime: Women Lawyers, Television, and L.A. Law,” Yale Journal of Law and Feminism, 2 (1990), 371; Suzanne Frentz, “T.V. Law: Image Versus Reality,” Focus on Law Studies, 7 (1991), 1; Judith Grant, “Prime Time Crime; Television Portrayals of Law Enforcement,” Journal of American Culture, 15 (1992), 57; Michael Asimow, “When Lawyers Were Heroes,” 30 U. San Francisco Law Rev., 30 (1996), 1131; Ralph Berets, “Changing Images of Justice in American Films,” Legal Studies Forum, 20 (1996), 473; Justin P. Brooks, “Will Boys Just Be Boyz N the Hood? African-American Directors Portray a Crumbling Justice System in Urban America,” Oklahoma City University Law Review, 22 (1997), 1; Randall Coyne, “Images of Lawyers and the Three Stooges,” ibid., 247; Laura Krugman, “Judicial Fictions: Images of Supreme Court Justices in the Novel, Drama, and Film,” Arizona Law Review, 39 (1997), 151; Peter Brooks and Paul Gewirtz, eds. Law’s Stories: Narrative and Rhetoric in the Law (New Haven, 1996); Robert M. Jarvis and Paul R. Josephs, eds., Prime Time Law: Fictional Television as Legal Narrative (Carolina Academic Pr., 1998); Austin Sarat and Thomas R. Kearns, eds., Law in the Domains of Culture (Michigan, 1998); and Richard K. Sherwin, When Law Goes Pop: The Vanishing Line Between Law and Popular Culture (Chicago, 2000).

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